textile design & new technologies

Fragile interactive textiles

Today I saw a post on Fashioningtech which presents some beautiful and delicate creations of a certain Zuzana Serbak.

Delicately dangling from a shirt pocket or wrapped around one’s wrist, Zuzana Serbak’s fabric sculptures are inspired by the concept of “fragile conductivity.”

In her wearable art, Serbak embraces LEDs more for their ephemeral materiality (light) rather than computational capability (display). Serbak takes advantage of soft circuits ultimate weakness — their fragile connectivity — and uses its instability as a point of interactivity.

“The circuit is so fragile that it just comes into existence when fabric is slightly touched, stretched, whipped,” Serbak says. ” Without any coding and computerization it interacts with the movement of body. When it’s directly on the skin,light reacts on subtle pulsation and breath.” The end result is delicate fabric wearables inlayed with details of lace that serve “more likely a conceptual piece of art or an experimental jewel, rather then a rigorously precise scientific application. ”

I think her use of technology is quite smart and sensitive. her creations aren note based on “performance” but on poetic, which brings a contribution to the seek of new aesthetics of wearables.